My Journey with Farrah - Alana Stewart [73]
Afterward, she, Ryan, and I watched Dominick Dunne’s show, Power, Privilege and Justice, on television, and she was able to watch the entire show before she went to sleep. We had a really nice evening together. I felt encouraged when I left.
April 17, 2009
Tonight Farrah, Ryan, and I were all piled on her bed watching the cut of the documentary that Ryan and I had already seen and that we—and NBC—were disappointed in. Farrah watched the entire thing intently. Afterward, she said very clearly, “You guys have a lot of work to do.” Then she turned over and went to sleep.
April 18, 2009
It’s been a long, stressful week. Farrah signed all the papers that the attorney and business manager needed her to sign so that Ryan can take over creative control of the documentary while she isn’t able to oversee it.
Ryan went to his wrap party tonight, so I told him I’d stay with Farrah. The nurse was there, but it didn’t seem right to leave Farrah alone without one of us. I made her some toast, the kind her dad makes where you put dabs of butter on white bread and put it in the toaster oven. She ate a few bites, but that was all. The doctor ordered IV nutrition for her today and she has it dripping into her twenty-four hours a day. She’s so much thinner now than she was in the hospital; it looks as if I could get my finger and thumb around her arm. She’s so weak that she can barely get up by herself.
I talked to Dr. Piro about it today. He said that if she started to gain a little weight and strength he could start her back on some of the cancer drugs, but at the moment she can’t tolerate anything. It scares me that it could be only a matter of time now. I hope I’m wrong; I hope she hasn’t given up. How could she not at some point? How much suffering can a body go through before all the fight is gone? I think those two surgeries and the liver procedure and the accompanying pain on top of the chemo she’d had here were just too much for her. It doesn’t seem possible that it was almost two years ago that the cancer returned and she made that first trip to Germany. It seems like yesterday that we were all there. It had been such a successful trip, and we left with high hopes that she was going to beat this. And now…
I lay on the bed with her for a long time tonight. She was in and out of sleep, and I just lay there thinking and staring at the muted television screen. Finally, for the first time in weeks, I cried. Not the wracking sobs I feel somewhere deep inside me, just moist, silent tears sliding down my cheeks. The Farrah that I’ve known for so long is no longer there. I’m losing my best friend; in many ways I’ve already lost her. I’m grieving for that loss. How do I accept that we’ll never go shopping again or get manicures or make pecan pies at Christmas? Or commiserate about our children, our men, our little aches and pains? Everything is always so much more fun when she is there.
April 26, 2009
I’m trying to catch up with everything. We met all Friday afternoon with Doug Vaughan, the NBC exec, who flew out from New York for the day, and Sandy Gleysteen, the producer they’ve brought on board to try to pull this mess together. Both Ryan and I liked Doug and Sandy very much and feel like we’re all on the same page, to make something that Farrah will be as proud of as if she’d been able to oversee it herself.
I went over to the apartment yesterday morning to film Redmond coming to visit Farrah. He’s still in jail in the Twin Towers, but they let him come to see his mom for a couple of hours. He was accompanied by two sheriffs, who literally waited inside the door of Farrah’s room while Redmond saw her. They took his handcuffs off so she wouldn’t see them, but his ankles were still shackled. It nearly broke my heart to see him like that. The first couple of times he went into her room she was barely awake, but then later she woke up and was able to talk